The Nanafalia plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
Nanafalia’s center stands about 230 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 50 ft to 270 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Campbell Mountain, about 420 ft, 14 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows High terrace deposits (sand), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 56×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Silt, clay. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Nanafalia reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Sweetwater Creek, Horse Creek, the Tombigbee and the Mobile: about 170 river miles.
120 miles of the trip are on the Tombigbee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Nanafalia; river miles along the main stem, rounded.